YouTube's 'ad skip button' finally disappears
For those who are not subscribed to YouTube Premium, you may have seen that when you try to play a video on YouTube, an ad is played and a skip button appears in the bottom right. Android Police, an IT news site, reported that they have confirmed that this skip button is hidden until you watch the ad for a certain amount of time.
YouTube is now hiding the skip button on mobile too
YouTube has strongly criticized free riders who don't subscribe to paid plans and don't watch ads as a violation of its terms of service, but users have tried all sorts of methods to skip ads, from browser extensions to ad blocking apps and fake YouTube clients, so YouTube is trying to take a step further.
On October 2, 2024, a user of the bulletin board social news site Reddit discovered that when watching YouTube on a PC, the 'number of seconds until you can skip the ad' and the 'skip ad button' were filled with black rectangles.
YouTube adding blackout squares over adverts to hide the “skip” button
by u/BigBlueMountainStar in extremely infuriating
At the time, there were only a few reports of this behavior, and Android Police was unable to reproduce it on a PC or smartphone app, so they concluded that it 'may be a limited test being conducted on a small number of users.'
However, about a week later, on October 8, 2024, Android Police confirmed that the skip button was similarly hidden in the Android version of the YouTube app.
What's more, unlike the previously reported cases where the skip button was filled in with a black rectangle, in the cases seen by Android Police, the button didn't appear until the ad had been watched.
Here's what the app does: First, it tries to play a YouTube video.
An ad movie will play. During this time, the skip button will not be displayed.
After a certain amount of time had passed, when the yellow bar at the bottom of the video playback space reached the right edge, a skip button appeared.
Android Police noted that there is no official information about this behavior, so it is unclear what will happen in the future, but said, 'This is a small but important change that we believe may become standard behavior for YouTube in the future, if it isn't already.'
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